My old Q6600 (quad core 2.4 GHz) is feeling rather old, so I thought I'd get a new box to play with while I decide what to use as my next main box.

I've now looked at the AMD X6 1055T (125W version) with 6 cores at 2.8 GHz, at a low price. Around this I'm using a Gigabyte GA-MA785GT-UD3H and 2x1GB of Kingston DDR3 1333 CL7 ram, and OCZ 400W PSU. Drives wise for now it has a DVD writer and 500GB SATA hard disk. Installed Win7-64 for initial testing, will switch to Ubuntu once I'm happy with the hardware.

Build didn't go straight forward. 1st boot didn't feel right. Long story short, the mobo bios was one revision too early to support the CPU and it wouldn't run stably. I had to get an old CPU to perform the update before it worked.

Stress testing didn't go well either. I used the cooler that came bundled with the CPU. I know they're not the best, but based on the Intel ones recently used I thought it would be ok. Not in AMD's case. They use a 60mm fan which spun up to 6900 rpm under load! You don't want to hear that, and if you do, you might not hear much else for longer. That wasn't sustainable. An 80mm fan and two cable ties later I now have it running quiet enough. The CPU is rated to 62C according to AMD's web site, and I'm touching under load that according to AMD's overdrive utility.

System power consumption measured at the mains has hit a peak of 230W. That's quite warm... drops below 80W idle at desktop. I have a better cooler on order.

I’m out of the loop these days, I haven’t put up a computer for three years now, but I thought that by now AMD would be more considerate about global warming. It had that reputation for being quite helpful in cold winters Seriously, why did you choose AMD? I’m not against them for sure; I’d like to know what it has better than the competition.

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Good grief, why would anyone design a CPU cooler with a fan that can run at speeds up to 6,900 rpm?

These days I tend to favour coolers with fans which blow down through the cooler and onto the motherboard and the bigger the fan the better with my latest build having a Core™ i5-661 cooled by a 12cm fan, and heatsink to match, which runs below 1,000 rpm at idle and at around 1,600 rpm at full load. Quiet and it has the advantage of providing plenty of air over the passively cooled componentry elsewhere on the motherboard. Other fan geometries may be slightly more efficient at CPU cooling for the extreme overclockers but this is the one that works for me.

Why AMD? At the moment the X6 is the value option for total throughput. The power rating isn't great, but per-core it isn't far off and the increased density arguably dilutes the cost of the rest of the system. There is a 95W version of this CPU but they're not easy to obtain individually.

The AMD cooler used a high speed 60mm, where they could have easily used a moderate speed 80mm as I have bodged now. The heatsink itself is arguably more complex than the Intel ones, as the AMD one makes use of heat pipes to suspended fins where the fan is mounted, but I'm not convinced there's enough metal on it. My Intel system currently runs a fan at 1400 rpm under continuous load.

My Q6600@3.6 ghz runs at....29 idle (23 ambient), and 50 when stress testing. When 3D rendering it gets to about 40-45. (all celsius). Using a Scythe Mugen 2 as a cooler, with 2 push and pull fans though, and a case with a LOT of fans.

_________________I take pictures so quickly, my highschool was "Continuous High".

The way I work is if the PC can take 100% load continuously, anything else isn't going to bother it. I tend to leave my main PC on 24/7 doing something, typically FPU intensive operations make it run pretty hot. The highest temps I see on Intel processors are from running Linpack, using a utility like LinX. This is beyond what I normally run at, but it is pretty much worst case stress test. A more representative load case is running prime95 on all cores.

I'm not new to overclocking. I've done pretty much everything up to but not including building my own phase change cooler from scratch. I stopped about the time I discovered photography actually, guess where my cash goes now? That was a while ago hence I'm not fully up to date on hardware any more.

Got a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus on it now. Temps dropped like a rock and it is so quiet. Perfect, other than the heatsink is too tall so I can't put the lid back on the computer case!

Also started to overclock it. Only 25% increase from 2800 stock to 3500 for now, but as an accident I undervolted it too! So the overclocked condition is not only faster but using less power than stock. This is insane...

Stock: 2800 MHz, 194W under load
OC'd: 3500 MHz, 182W under load

I'm stability testing this condition as it is a possible sweet spot to use due to the way the multipliers line up with standard clocks for other subsystems. Of course I'm not going to stop here, and will see how far I can go!

I might have to accelerate my plans to switch main systems... basically everything else I have before is feeling so obsolete now.

While I haven't used Intel i3/5/7 generation CPUs, I can easily say the stock coolers from the Core 2 era (Exxxx, Qxxxx) are much better than what AMD ship right now with the X6 1055. Yes, they're noisy at high speed, but it is an air moving sound, which is infinitely less painful than the ridiculous RPM on the AMD fan. Reading around it seems current AMD CPUs are less tolerant to higher temps than Intel but I've not looked into it in detail. But I don't think this too important as you can get significantly higher performing 3rd party coolers very cheap. The only time I ever run stock coolers is if there isn't room for anything bigger.

I don't think the market has really changed though. If you want maximum performance regardless of cost, it has to be Intel. If you want enough performance at moderate cost, only then does AMD start to become interesting. This only shows how out of date my main system is (Q6600).

Why so little ram? As stated in the original post this is a test system for now. I didn't have any intention at the time to switch it to a main system as essentially I'd have to get a load of other new stuff too. My original plan was to wait for the next-gen Intel platform to arrive and hopefully that'll coincide with Win8. Do both at the same time.